Staff Profile

Career Summary

Biography

Dr. Hamish Ford is Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies (FMCS) at UoN. As of November 2012 he has also been FMCS head of discipline. His teaching is primarily based within the area of film studies.

As a researcher, Hamish is best known for work on post-war European modernist cinema, the relationship between film and 20th Century European philosophy, and more recently contemporary world cinema and postcolonial film studies.In late 2012 his first sole-authored book, Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Since gaining a PhD at UNSW in 2005 (with a thesis combining film studies and select philosophy) he has regularly published in prominent local and international journals and contributed chapters to high-profile scholarly books. When it comes to teaching, course creation and coordination, subsequent to first being appointed as a Lecturer at UoN in 2008, Hamish has substantively re-written the film studies corriculum and consistently received excellent responses from students as indicated by Faculty, staff, and student originated feedback mechanisms (including being nominated in the 'best lecturer' awards every year). Prior to his arrival at Newcastle, he taught at multiple different universities in Sydney (University of NSW; University of Sydney; University of Western Sydney; and University of Technology). .

Hamish's research currently due for publication during 2015 includes: a book chapter on visual style in the 1970s films of Robert Altman (A Companion to Robert Altman, Wiley/Blackwell); a chapter charting the development of modernist European cinema from Michelangelo Antonioni to Theo Angelopoulos (The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, University of Edinburgh Press); a refereed journal article for Senses of Cinema on modernism and realism in Antonioni's early 1960s films; and a refereed journal article in SubStance on Peter Watkins' film La commune (Paris, 1871) and Henri Lefebvre's theoretical work on space. In the wake of of Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time's publication, Hamish is now also working on three book projects in various stages of preparation due for completion in the next five years. The first is a collaborative work on film and architecture, based around the theme of different films' presentation of revolutionary moments in history, co-authored with A/Prof. Michael Chapman (UoN, School of Architecture and Built Environment). The remaining projects both take in extensive completed international archive and library research (funded through UoN internal grants). These two monographs will respectively address in close-up select films by Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. He is also planning, along with co-conveners A/Prof. Chapman and Dr. Sam Spurr (College of Fine Arts, UNSW) to develop a research nexus and conference event on film and architecture, to be held in Newcastle in late 2015.

In addition to academic research in and around the area of film studies, Hamish is also the author of magazine, newspaper and online articles covering film, media, culture, and politics in local publications such as Australian Book Review, The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, ABC Drum, Online Opinion, and New Matilda, plus Spiked! (UK) and ZNet (USA).

Collaboration

My current primary collaborative project is a book on the relationship between film and architecture. This is being researched and co-written together with Dr Michael Chapman from the University of Newcastle's School of Architecture and Built Environment. This is due to publication in 2014.

Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 film, Brink of Life, has received very little substantial analysis. In this essay I concentrate on the film's important early role in the development of the writer-director’s famous ‘chamber drama’ form in its treatment of space and the human face, as well as the portrayal of women’s experience in a male-controlled culture.
The essay analyses Brink of Life's treatment of its central female characters from different class backgrounds as they experience pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage and abortion in a Stockholm hospital ward. The result, I argue, is an uncharacteristically political account of gender and personal experience in Bergman's cinema. I concurrently chart the film's chief expressive means of presenting such thematic material through the director's innovative early use of extended close-ups and framing of the human body within stark interior space, clearly presaging such hermetic images in his more famous subsequent work.
Based on my previous research on Bergman, Madman Entertainment commissioned me to write a booklet essay for their Australian DVD release of Brink of Life. In addition to it likely being read by purchasers and borrowers of the DVD, the resulting essay has had 353 page reads on my Academia.edu page since uploading, which is surprising in light of its addressing an obscure film (by a famous director) and that it was not published in a journal or edited book. Considering the essay's 4,256-word length and scholarly referencing (there are 7 different citations), it is comparable to a B1, C1 or C2 in scholarly contribution.

Creative Work (4 outputs)

Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 film, Brink of Life, has received very little substantial analysis. In this essay I concentrate on the film's important early role in the development of the writer-director’s famous ‘chamber drama’ form in its treatment of space and the human face, as well as the portrayal of women’s experience in a male-controlled culture.
The essay analyses Brink of Life's treatment of its central female characters from different class backgrounds as they experience pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriage and abortion in a Stockholm hospital ward. The result, I argue, is an uncharacteristically political account of gender and personal experience in Bergman's cinema. I concurrently chart the film's chief expressive means of presenting such thematic material through the director's innovative early use of extended close-ups and framing of the human body within stark interior space, clearly presaging such hermetic images in his more famous subsequent work.
Based on my previous research on Bergman, Madman Entertainment commissioned me to write a booklet essay for their Australian DVD release of Brink of Life. In addition to it likely being read by purchasers and borrowers of the DVD, the resulting essay has had 353 page reads on my Academia.edu page since uploading, which is surprising in light of its addressing an obscure film (by a famous director) and that it was not published in a journal or edited book. Considering the essay's 4,256-word length and scholarly referencing (there are 7 different citations), it is comparable to a B1, C1 or C2 in scholarly contribution.